Politicians Category

Rotherham: a look at the story of abuse, prejudice and dereliction of duty in Yorkshire.

What we know is that happened in the past. But what we really want to know is what’s happening now? But the conversation is obsessed with matters of historic sex abuse in Rotherham and elsewhere by gangs of men of mainly Pakistani origin is not allowing us to see the now.

The temptation is to believe that with this abuse high on the news cycle, the assaults on vulnerable and underage girls by gangs of sexual deviants is over. Scared of exposure and prison, the criminals have stopped.

A Canadian MP blamed his too-tight underpants for leaving parliament in a hurry on Thursday morning….

Squeaky bum time

“I can blame it on a sale that was down at the Hudson’s Bay [Company] – they had men’s underwear on for half price. I bought a bunch that was clearly too small for me and I find it difficult to sit for any length of time.” So says Canadian MP Pat Martin explaining why had left his seat after a vote.

“I apologize if it was necessary for me to leave my seat briefly, but I did not mean to forfeit my right to vote.”

The dire Channel 4 drama about the UK Independence Party, UKIP, the first 100 days, never did find someone to murder Nigel Farage, as Channel 4 once fantacised about the killing of George Bush. Maybe they’re saving that for the sequel?

A man has been barred from riding the Paris Metro by a gaggle of Cheslea fans. The episode is caught on video. The Chelsea fans are white. The man trying to board the train is black. Some Chelsea fans sing about being racist and enjoying it.

And – kaboom! – a small, nasty incident in a foreign city becomes a huge deal. The elite wade in.

The Sun leads with the news:

On Page 5, readers are ordered to “FIND PIGS OF PARIS”. The Sun says “an international hunt” is under way for the dicks who sang “We’re racist and that’s the way we like it” and giving full throat to the refrain “Where were you in World War 2?”

The supreme leaders of the North Korean republic have moved to further unite the populace by creating 310 new slogans. Something might be lost in translation. But, then, it might also have been an improvement on the original.

Here are some choice slogans to chant:

Let us turn the whole country into a socialist fairyland by the joint operation of the army and people!

Should the enemy dare to invade our country, annihilate them to the last man so that none of them will survive to sign the instrument of surrender!

Let us turn ours into a country of mushrooms by making mushroom cultivation scientific, intensive and industrialized!

Make fruits cascade down and their sweet aroma fill the air on the sea of apple trees at the foot of Chol Pass!

Should the enemy dare to invade our country, annihilate them to the last man!

Let the strong wind of fish farming blow across the country!

Let the wives of officers become dependable assistants to their husbands!

Remember when Tony Blair took the country to war in the Balkans? Just as in Iraq, this too was a moral crusade to spare the world from evil. Britain’s part in the Blakans war chimed with Tony Blair’s aim to give the country a unifying identity based on sound morals. In 1999, the then Prime Minister opined:

‘We need to find a new national moral purpose for this new generation. People want to live in a society that is without prejudice, but is with rules. Government can play its part, but parents have to play their part. There’s got to be a partnership between Government and the country to lay the foundations of that moral purpose.’

Blair was talking abour the young and pregnant, who needed to be made aware that their choices were morally wrong. But he could have easily been talking about Iraq and the Balkans. Blair was hawkish on war against the Serbs and their leader Slobodan Milošević.

Blair explained why?

There were big strategic interests that would have justified intervention in their own right. But I felt that this was the closest thing to racial genocide that I’ve seen in Europe since the Second World War. I didn’t feel that we could simply stand aside from that if we had the means, which we did, to intervene and to stop it.

Is racial diversity important to your readership? What about class? Age? Religion? David Wearing spots the London Evening Standard’s “expert team for analysis and comment oin the toughest election in years”:

Boris Johnson, London Mayor, shares his view on British jihadis with straight-thinking, dry-handed, non-tossing Sun readers:

“If you look at all the psychological profiling about bombers, they typically will look at porn. They are literally w**kers. Severe onanists. They are tortured. They will be very badly adjusted in their relations with women, and that is a symptom of their feeling of being failures and that the world is against them. They are not making it with girls, and so they turn to other forms of spiritual comfort — which of course is no comfort… I fervently think we need to demystify this lot. The people most likely to get involved in IS or be radicalised are the same as those most vulnerable to getting dragged into drug gangs or other criminal activity. They are just young men in desperate need of self-esteem who do not have a particular mission in life, who feel that they are losers and this thing makes them feel strong — like winners.

“I want to hear a proper angry Islamic theological denunciation of what is going wrong. We won’t succeed if Western politicians go around bashing and blaming Islam — that is hopeless. This problem can only be addressed if Muslim authorities and clerics find a powerful and compelling way of setting up an alternative narrative for young people that makes this seem irrelevant.”

Jihadis are tossers. Not exactly news, there. The biggest bansturbators always are the most suggestible.

This charming inspired piece of garden sculpture features a caricature of Nigel Farage (MEP), leader of the UK Independence Party. He is dressed, rather appropriately, in full John Bull garb, complete with Union Flag waistcoat, UKIP colour scheme, and is holding his trademark pint of mild in one hand, and a fag in the other, just like the real thing.

He stands 6 inches high* (I don’t care for centimeters), and is made from a weather resistant acrylic bond , is hand painted and sealed against the vagaries of the British weather (As one would expect from Nigel himself)

Buy now. Buy often!

Anorak is struck by how closely Farage gnome resembles a young Viscount Linley.

In “Con Her Majesty’s Secret Service”, the Sun tells how a hoax caller managed to speak with the cheif of GCHQ and David Cameron. The Sun knows this because the – get this – hoax caller called the Sun and told them about it.

The caller, described as “boozy”, managed to contact “top spy” Robert Hannigan, Cameron before calling the Sun “to brag about it”.

He boasted he was drunk and on drugs but still got to speak to the chief of the GCHQ surveillance base.

“The Prime Minister ended the call when it became clear it was a hoax. In neither instance was sensitive information disclosed. Both GCHQ and No10 take security seriously and both are currently reviewing procedures.”

That spokesman, of course, could be a fake. But the anonymous caller can be totally trusted, telling the Sun:

“I’ve just made complete monkeys out of GCHQ. I’ve got the mobile number of the director. What’s more, I am off my face on booze and cocaine. I had some spliffs too.I’ve been up all night. I’m utterly wasted. Hilarious.”

But the best line comes from the Sun:

The man — who sounded well-educated and from the South East…

We’re looking for a well-educated Home Counties man on drugs. Seal the doors at Westminster. This looks like an inside job…

As Brendan O’Neill writes of the shrill campaing to ban the Sun’s naff Page 3:

All this talk of ridding Britain of the scourge of Page 3 brings to mind the Suffragette Mary Richardson, who in 1914 took a knife into the National Gallery and slashed Velazquez’s ‘Rokeby Venus’. “I didn’t like the way men visitors gaped at it all day long.” Richardson later became the head of the women’s section of the British Union of Fascists.

Some 46.6 per cent would vote “out” while just 34.3 per cent would vote “in”, with 19.1 per cent undecided.

In December 2014, the Express has other news.

46.6% became 51% is now 80%. Things move fast in Eu poll-ville.

The Express is getting mroe and more in-tune with its readers.

The Express and UKIP are in chorus:

Nigel Farage sees the 80% and tweets:

But what about that 80%? Martyn Brown notes:

BRITAIN is marching towards the EU exit door today after eight out of 10 people voted to leave in a historic poll.

That eight in ten:

Some 14,581 people voted – 11,706 of them want the UK to quit compared with 2,725 who want to remain part of the EU. The mini-referendum – the first on the issue since 1975 – was organised by two senior Tory backbenchers and a prospective Tory MP.

Three Tories conducted a poll. Who was polled?

The Tory poll was organised across three neighbouring parliamentary constituencies by Peter Bone, MP for Wellingborough, Philip Hollobone, MP for Kettering, and Tom Pursglove, who is standing as Tory candidate for Corby and East Northamptonshire at this year’s general election.

So. A poll of three constituencies speaks for the entire UK?

Following the count, carried out in the London offices of the Daily Express yesterday, Mr Bone said: “Eight out of 10 people who took part want to come out of Europe – that is extraordinary.

“It is very, very, very clear they want to come out.”

So. Of the people who actually replied to the poll, 780% want out. How many did not respond to the poll?

The voting exercise was the biggest poll on the issue since the national referendum in June 1975.

Ballot papers were delivered to 100,000 households in the three ­constituencies between May and the end of last year.

There were a total of 150 spoiled papers.

11,706 people of 100,000 in Northamptonshire wants to leave the EU. That’s 11.7%.

PS: The Express previously reported: “Ballot papers will be delivered to 150,000 households in the three constituencies after the polls close for the European Parliament elections on May 22.”

Those new green wellies worn by British politicians when wading past flooded homes might not be so bad.

A municipal inspector has been suspended after photos emerged of him being carried by farmers to avoid getting his shoes dirty in the snow. Nedim Zurnaci, head of the rural services department in the eastern Manisa province, was on a visit to assess the damage done by heavy snowfall in the area…

Photos of the incident were published widely in the Turkish media, and it wasn’t long before local authorities became involved. Mayor Cengiz Ergun said the behaviour “did not comply with the municipality’s attitude of service, citizen relations and values”, and announced Mr Zurnaci had been suspended while an investigation was carried out,

Judgin by the man on the left in the above photo, that goop eats your feet…

Thoughts on UKip, by Douglas Carswell, the former Tory now a Ukip MP. Carswell is writing in the Daily Mail. His stand-out comments are on race:

There has never been anything splendid about isolation. It was our interdependence that put the Great into Great Britain – and it is what sustains our living standards today. In such a world, a dislike of foreigners is not merely offensive, but absurd…

Far from being a party that tolerates pejorative comments about people’s heritage and background, Ukip in 2015 has to show that we have a serious internationalist agenda..

No Ukip candidate should ever make the mistake of blaming outsiders for the failings of political insiders in Westminster.

Rather than arguing about labels, let us agree to allow the facts to speak for themselves. Farage is a rabble-rouser and a coward. He plays with racism, the way Ian Paisley used to play with sectarianism: whips it up, then backs off just before he can be accused of inciting violence…

As for the men and women he leads, Ukip candidates and donors have suggested they want to drive Lenny Henry out of Britain because he is black, bar women from the boardroom and stop gays from having sex because as, everyone knows, God punishes the sin of Sodom by flooding the Thames Valley.

If you cannot call Ukip a far-right party, you can at least say that it is an alliance of the septic and the geriatric: a movement of the empty-headed led by the foul-minded.

Ukip is the empty vessel into which people pour their hates. It just so happens that what Farage and all Ukip supporters are filling that vessel with other races.

Obama and the FBI blame the hacking attacks against Sony Pictures on North Korea. Who knew the DPRK regime was capable? The hacks were triggered by the The Interview, in which two American journalists played by James Franco and Seth Rogen set out to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Amid threats of movie theater terrorism, Sony pulled the film from its Christmas Day release.

The whole Sony story has a certain twisted dark comedy flavor with CEO Michael Lynton bickering with Obama over the release of what is said to be an unwatchable movie. It sure looks that way from the trailers. If the NORKS had any brains, they should just have let the film be released and it would have sunk like a stone. But perhaps they had other intentions — or someone did — beyond making fun of inane Hollywood studio executives or even silencing a movie.

The cyber attack on the studio has a serious side and it’s not really about North Korea. It’s about who helped North Korea, the assumption being that the NORKS don’t quite have the technical expertise to pull this off by themselves. Russia, China and Iran are the three candidates whose names have been thrown into the hopper as possible co-perps — maybe more than one of them.

One important point in the President’s remarks today: a potentially ominous nod to the need for more regulation and control over the internet. The internet now is like “the Wild West,” he said, “We need more rules about how the internet should operate.” Cybersecurity is an urgent issue, and the Sony hacks underscore that, said the president. But when heads of state talk about more state control over the internet, rarely does greater freedom of speech result.

The only problem: At least one cable company preemptively surrendered to North Korean intimidation, too, reportedly saying it would not air the film. Now, even if Sony had a backbone transplant, it couldn’t release the movie.

Sony could still dump it on the Internet and let it spread virally. It would lose ticket sales, but the company would strike a defiant blow nonetheless.

Don’t hold your breath. Sony would rather go the way of appeasement. And so would everyone else, it seems.

For Pascal, 56, and Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton, 54, the damage has gotten far worse as the flood of stolen material — including both of their email inboxes — keeps coming, and on Dec. 16, the hackers, dubbed Guardians of Peace, threatened a 9/11-style attack on theaters that show Seth Rogen’s North Korea assassination comedy The Interview. Pascal, the lead creative executive on Interview, tells THR she believes she has the backing of her Tokyo-based employers. But by now, high-level insiders have moved from speculating about whether she will be replaced to asking when and by whom.

At a press conference on Friday, President Obama said Sony made “a mistake” by canceling the release of The Interview. He also praised the film’s stars Seth Rogen and James … Flacco? If, like actor James Franco, you want a new last name—one you can share with an NFL quarterback—then use our name generator below.

What I wonder is why people aren’t a little more put off by a form of censorship that is more insidious, and will likely affect far more movies in the long run: the soft censorship of appealing to the Chinese government in order to reap the Chinese box office. There have been widespread claims that recent blockbuster movies like the latest Transformers have been written so as to appease Chinese censors. There’s nothing wrong with writing movies to reach out to a particularly huge foreign box office– why wouldn’t you want your movie to play to Chinese moviegoers?– but appealing to the Chinese government is a whole other ball of wax. That’s where you can see genuine self-censorship coming in. And while I imagine that this whole thing will blow over before long, without a great deal of long-term damage, I think the urge to play in China -and for the Chinese government — will only grow over time.

The problem of willingly selling out to the Chinese reminded me of Ayn Rand, whose bracing moral lessons I’m sure Freddie had in the back of his mind. Rand’s finest novel,The Fountainhead, is an anti-capitalist screed about the spiritual and cultural evil of catering to market demand. Forget the problem of giving the commie censors what they want. It’s wrong to give the free market what it wants, when what it wants is aesthetically debased, which it always is. The architect hero of The Fountainhead, Howard Roark, is the ultimate in spine, the patron saint of never selling out. When one of his perfect, austere modernist buildings is bowdlerized the better to suit the public taste, he blows it up. That’s right, Howard Roark is a terrorist, a jihadi for artistic integrity. Maybe Howard Roark is the answer. Maybe can show us the way. Maybe Sony needs to feel that it is unsafe not to release The Interview. Maybe Seth Rogen needs to blow something up! Or maybe Brian Beutler is on to something, and the best we can do is call on Anonymous to steal the movie and make sure that, in this case at least, market-based American spinelessness can’t put a gag on our precious stoner auteurs.

Sony is a for-profit entity, and not even an American one, that effectively has important influence over American culture. We don’t entrust for-profit entities with the common defense. And recognizing that the threat to a Sony picture is actually a threat to the freedom of American culture ought to lead us to a public rather than a private solution.

The federal government should take financial responsibility. Either Washington should guarantee Sony’s financial liability in the event of an attack, or it should directly reimburse the studio’s projected losses so it can release the movie online for free. The latter solution has the attractive benefit of ensuring a far wider audience for the film than it would otherwise have attracted.

After Sony Pictures announced yesterday that it was pulling the release of The Interview, a film about two American journalists sent to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un,from its scheduled Christmas Day release after threats of movie theater terrorism, several theaters across the U.S. said that they would show Team America: World Police instead.

The basic idea was to replace one movie mocking the North Korean regime with another. Team America, an all-puppet comedy from South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, pits its heroes against a sad-sack version of former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. At the end of the movie, he’s impaled on a giant spike, and it’s revealed that he’s actually an alien cockroach. Fitting!..

The Daily Beastreports that theaters in Cleveland and Atlanta that had planned to make the switch say that Paramount, the studio behind Team America, has ordered them to stop. The Alamo Drafthouse in Texas, which also planned to show the puppet comedy, announced on Twitter this afternoon that due to “circumstances beyond our control” its Team America screening has been cancelled…. blocking replacement screenings of Team America can really only be described as next-level cowardly bullshit.

Sony was just the latest – Janice Turner:

Not only has Paramount pulled Team America, a decade-old puppet comedy parodying Kim Jong Un’s father, but a Steve Carell movie based upon the graphic novel Pyongyang. This is no comic, but an account by Guy Delisle of his time as an animator in a North Korean studio, constantly monitored by minders yet getting glimpses of the regime in all its absurdity and horror. This is a film that needed to be made.

And when the Sony cave-in was announced, Carell tweeted a still from The Great Dictator. It is an apt comparison: Charlie Chaplin’s devastating and humane 1940 parody did not bring down Hitler but it gave succour to those who were trying. Such was its propaganda value that while it was in production and Britain was still pursuing appeasement, the government planned to ban it for fear of riling the Führer. It was inspired by Chaplin watching Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will: while other anti-Nazis were awed and dismayed by its grandiosity, Chaplin fell about laughing…

…too often, the response to any threat has been cowardice and complicity. Hollywood just behaved like the entire British establishment which dropped Salman Rushdie after The Satanic Verses rather than turning on his illiberal persecutors. And even now Newsnight refuses to show an affectionate Jesus and Mo cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad, siding with Salafist extremists rather than moderate Muslims who argued the image was inoffensive.

What if one of America’s violent anti-choice groups threatens cinemas showing a film in which a woman has abortion? Will we capitulate every time the lawyers get nervous? Because Sony Pictures just put artistic freedom in turnaround. And this is no joke.

Free speech has been under attack for an age. North Korea was just picking up the vibe…